Download ANCIENT EGYPT: Your Name

ANCIENT EGYPT: Your Name ________________
What is a Civilization?
The word civilization means a place where
people live together, and use each other’s resources in
a community or larger state. People didn’t use to live
in cities or countries. Many were nomadic, meaning
they moved from place to place looking for the best
resources to help them live.
The first civilizations all had something in
common. First of all, they were situated on rivers
that provided them with the water they needed and
transportation. Secondly, they were easily defended,
because they were either surrounded by deserts, seas,
mountains, or all of those. This allowed their cities to
grow because they didn’t have to spend all their time
on self-defense. Thirdly, their river valleys were very
fertile. They were able to settle down and live in the
same spot permanently. This also gave them time to
start thinking, which leads to new ideas and invention.
The Geography of Egypt
Even today, only 1% of the country of Egypt is habitable
by people on a permanent basis. 99% of the land is covered
by rocky desert with very little or no water. Egypt became
important because of a single river--the longest river in the
world--which cut a 750 mile green ribbon of life through
barren desert lands. The Nile River Valley featured dry
air, most soil, lots of a good stone (for building), and mild
floods, which would blanket the valley with new silt (fresh
topsoil) every spring. Because of this there was always
plenty of food to eat.
The First Four Civilizations in No Particular Order
• YELLOW RIVER in China.
•The TIGRIS-EUPHRATES river in Iraq.
•The INDUS river valley in Pakistan.
•The NILE river valley in Egypt.
As I mentioned previously, each of these four areas
offered three key parts to allow them to stay. Lots of
water, easily defensible, and fertile crop land.
Unfortunately, we won’t have enough time to
study all of the early civilizations... we’ll be
concentrating on Egypt and the Nile River Valley.
YELLOW RIVER
NORTHERN CHINA
INDUS RIVER
WESTERN INDIA-PAKISTAN
The Two Egypts
When Egypt first
started, the country
was divided into an
UPPER KINGDOM
and a LOWER KINGDOM. The Lower
Kingdom was found on
the Nile Delta, where
the Nile empties into
the Mediterranean Sea.
The Nile flows north.
This is why the Lower
Kingdom was actually
located on the northern
half of Egypt, and the
Upper Kingdom on the
southern half.
TIGRIS-EUPHRATES
MESOPOTAMIA
(MODERN IRAQ)
*Peru and Mexico? We'll
discuss this in class some
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more.
Egypt is Unified Into One Country
Around 3000 B.C. (that’s right.... 5000 years
ago!) King Menes conquered Lower Egypt, and made
both countries combine under his leadership. He
started a dynasty. This means that his family would
be the leaders of the country until they completely
died out or were violently removed. During this time,
Egyptians invented....
•Linen: this was much more comfy to wear than
sheepskins or clothes made out of grass. They also
invented cotton fabrics, which they would wrap the
papyrus in. If you like wearing the
clothes you are wearing
today, thank the Egyptians.
•Paper: it wasn’t paper really,
but called papyrus. The Egyptians
were the first to write something
other than using soft mud or
carving on stone. Papyrus is a plant
that grows along the Nile.
•Writing: the Egyptians invented a written language called hieroglyphics. Their
writing was based on pictures. The Egyptian for
Rameses II, Nefertiti, and Hatshepsut are found above.
•Beauty Aids: Egyptians invented cosmetics,
hair dyes, wigs, and other things like combs,
jewelry, etc. They even invented a formula to make
their enemies hair fall out. That’s what they did to
this poor guy...
Egyptian Kings
In the old days, the kings of Egypt were killed
by the priests when they were too weak to rule. Not
only did they kill the king, but also all of his servants.
They built him a burial house called a “house of eternity.” This idea didn’t last forever though. The kings
finally wised up and got enough money to pay soldiers
to defend themselves against priests who wanted them
murdered. This forced the priests to substitute statues
and paintings instead of the bodies of servants into the
tombs when the king died of natural causes. The kings
liked this idea, so they hired more and more artists to
make sculptures of them while they were still alive.
As soon as the king died, the artwork was buried. The
kings thought that this was a way to keep them immortal (alive forever). The bad news for them though
was that it was usually robbed by tomb robbers.
This made kings and future kings very uneasy.
So to protect them after they died, they had
themselves buried into underground tombs with secret
tunnels. Because their bodies rotted faster underground, Egyptian chemists invented the mummification. The priests drained the body of fluid, inserted
chemical preservatives, and then wrapped the body in
layers and layers of cloth. The mummies were then
placed into a golden sarcophagus (or tomb-statue)
that would also help to preserve the bodies. That is
why you can go to the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities today, and see the actual bodies of kings who died
over four thousand years ago. That is, if you want
to....
Pyramids are Invented
King Zoser asked his architect Imhotep to
build him a tomb that would display his supreme
status. Imhotep built the tomb out of stone, instead of
the usual brick, and included a maze of underground
passages. As the rock from the underground came up,
it was used to pile a stepped-pyramid on top of the
tomb. A period of trial and error followed, where one
pyramid collapsed, and another was changed, before
they came up with the most common design around
2600 B.C. The first pyramid looked like this, and is
still standing after 4603 years!
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King Khufu
Khufu was a king who thought he was great
enough to have the first great pyramid. He made
100,000 people work 20 years on his tomb. The
people hated him, but he got his tomb. This started a
500 year long rule of Pharaohs... who was a king but
treated like a god. (Pharaoh is Egyptian for “Great
House”--they thought they were so great that people
couldn’t even say their names, so they had to call their
leaders “Great House” instead.)
Pyramids were covered in
ancient times with plaster. This
has since worn off. Khufu had
a nice one. To the left, Khufu's
name spelled in heiroglyphs.
The Pyramid of Khufu, also
called Cheops, was also sometimes called Philitis, who was
a local shepherd. The people
of Egypt hated Khufu so much,
that they started call the pyramid
Philitis....
Egyptians Invent Taxes
The Egyptian word for taxes meant “labor.”
The Pharaohs would make every one of their subjects
give them free labor during the year. This worked for
a long time, because the people not only thought of the
Pharaoh as a living god, but also because they didn’t
want to get squashed by his army. Even so, local governors were trying to grab their share of “tax-payers”
and in the process, made the Pharaoh mad. Around
2200 B.C., the king was overthrown, and these governors would rule their own small areas of the Nile
River Valley. This lasted for 300 years.
Egypt is Conquered By Horses
The Hyksos were a tribe of barbarians that
came from the north. They had a new weapon that
terrified the Egyptians--chariots. The Egyptian soldiers were powerless against the speed and size of the
chariots, so they had to give up. Two hundred years of
Hyksos rule taught the Egyptians a valuable lesson-they needed their own horses!
Mastering the chariot himself, Ahmose chased
the Hyksos back into Asia, and eliminated all of the
other kings who opposed him.
This is
Ahmose's battle
ax. He saved
Egypt by defeating the Hyksos
with chariots.
He was very
young when
became king.
The Egyptian Empire
The next pharaoh, Thutmose I, went about conquering lands around Egypt and fathering many children.
Unfortunately for him, all were daughters. According to
Egyptian law, one of the daughters had to marry the next
pharoh--who was her brother (yuk!) Thutmose II was
sickly and died very early. His wife/sister’s name was Hatshepsut. She knew that only men could be pharaohs, and
she wasn’t fired up to marry another brother, she pretended
to become a man. “King” Hatshepsut brought Egypt 20
years of peace. She/he encouraged Egypt to trade with
other cultures around the Nile, bringing great wealth to her
country. When she died, her nephew Thutmose the Great,
went on a rampage, killing and conquering for 30 years.
The Height of the Egyptian Empire
The Egyptians were actively trading with all the
tribes of the Eastern Mediterranean. In 1500 B.C., Egyptian scientists discovered that they could make a much
harder metal if they melted copper and tin together. They
called this bronze. It revolutionized tools and weapons.
The Empire continued to run smoothly for three more
generations with the Egyptians trading with other cultures.
Unfortunately, they continued to marry their daughters.
Their gene-pool was getting pretty thin.
One Pharaoh Changes Everything
King Akhenaton made everybody mad when he
said the sun god (Amon) was the only god in Egypt. Every
city had their own god, so when he said this, it made everybody realize that he was going to make everything in Egypt
his. And by the way, he said he was the only person that
was able to hear what Amon wanted, so everybody had to
listen to him.
Anyway, he spent all of Egypt’s money on building a brand new capital city (called Akhenaton), and didn’t
take the time to realize that his people were hungry and
revolting against him. Everything really fell apart when his
wife, Nefertiti (she was very beautiful and smart. By the
way--this is a famous statue of her in the Egyptian Museum
of Berlin) left him because he fell in love with his nephew.
The guy was a very strange man.
One historian's works that I
read called Akhenaton "the world's
first individual" because he was a
revolutionary. He made a single
religion, saw the beauty of the earth
around him, and changed the traditions of a very traditional country.
But most Egyptians were happy
when he died.
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King Tutankhamon (King Tut)
King Tutankhamon
was a little boy when he
became Pharaoh, and died
before his 20th birthday.
He is so famous because
his tomb remained undiscovered until this century! Remember, tomb
robbers had taken almost
everything they could
find, but Tutankhamon’s
tomb somehow was
never discovered. Archeologists (people who dig
things up) discovered a secret entrance to this tomb in
the 1920s, and when they opened the door, found that
the tomb had been sealed since the young boy’s death
over 3000 years ago. They found gold, jewels, and the
sarcophagus of Tut, considered by most to be the most
beautiful example ancient art ever discovered. The
walls were covered with hieroglyphics that explained
about life in Egypt during the time of Tut. It was one
of the greatest historical finds of this century. That is
why King Tut is so famous.
Ramses the Great
Ramses was a young pharaoh who wanted to
defeat the Hittites, which had pushed south into
present day Israel. He spent a couple of years gathering supplies and men to make his attack on their city
of Kadesh. The Hittite king heard of Ramses plan,
and began to build his own army. In April of 1288
B.C., the greatest battle of the ancient world began
when Ramses attacked the city of Kadesh. Ramses
thought the city was abandoned, because he didn’t see
any soldiers around. What he didn’t know was that
the Hittites were hiding on the other side of the city’s
walls. Ramses order his men to go to the city (into
the Hittites trap), even though it must have been pretty
obvious that Hittites were around (if fresh horse-droppings are any clue). Anyway, the Hittites cut Ramses
soldiers in half, and began to massacre them. Ramses
finally woke up to what was happening, and ordered
his men to retreat. He was only able to escape because
the Hittites began to loot and steal from the Egyptians
that they had already killed. Ramses ordered a
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The
Sarcophagus
of King
Tutankhamon
was found
along with the
rest of
valuable items
inside his
tomb, which
remained
much as it did
3000 years
ago. It was
discovered in
1923.
counterattack, and it became the Egyptians turn to
massacre the Hittites. By the end of the day, thousands of men and horses were dead, and nothing really
had changed at all. In the end, Ramses gave the Hittes
the city of Kadesh (which they already had) and he got
a daughter of the Hittite king. He spent the rest of his
life fathering children (our best guess is 50 sons and
52 daughters) and making monuments to himself. He
did deliver Egypt into a time of peace, and from peace,
comes strength.
Egypt Fades
After the death of Ramses, future Pharohs
spent all their money on themselves, rather than
making Egypt better and stronger. Within 300 years,
Egypt was conqured by a variety of foreign armies,
including the Greeks and Romans. So What?
Egypt has given us some unbelievable buildings, some of which are still standing after 3000 years
of being built. They invented written language. They
invented many kinds of art. They were the first to
show that you can make your country strong by trading with other countries. They invented papyrus, the
first type of paper. They invented bronze, which revolutionized tools. They left some fun stories to listen
to. They left their mark on history forever.
by Joe Waite